Feminist Perspectives and Women’s Domestic Spaces: Reading Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help

Two recent novels, Thrity Umrigar’s The Space Between Us (2007) and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009) articulate the process of establishment and defense of a critical domestic space: that between women and their servants. I want to use these texts to talk about the way feminist perspectives illuminate similar situations in divergent settings. Set in Bombay, India and Jackson, Mississippi, respectively, the novels nonetheless show striking parallels: both describe two households separated by class, in the same city but which might be worlds apart; both emphasize the deep dependence of the women on their servants, yet their need to maintain a separation, if only in their imagination; both unveil the ways the perceived notions of superiority of color/caste shape daily relationships in cities ruled by class prejudice, and a social structure firmly rooted in traditions; both stress how questions of race, class, gender, and culture configure relationships of mutual need and support. Umrigar and Stockett present the perspectives of both groups of women, producing nuanced texts that thematize the ways subjectivities enacted within a shared space and economic dependency are developed from opposing positions. I will explore the ways that the authors articulate the kinds of physical, psychological, and affective gaps established and maintained between the women within the domestic space. In both these novels, the lives of these women are intimately connected and yet profoundly removed from each other. In The Space Between Us, Sera Dubash, an upper-class Parsi homemaker, and her servant, Bhima, may share a cup of tea and chat as if they are close friends, and yet, Sera sits in a chair while Bhima must squat the floor and use her own cup for her tea. In The Help, the black domestics of the 1960s, run the houses, take over childcare duties, yet must use separate bathrooms and are subject to their mistresses’ whims and revenge. The focus on these themes in twenty-first century literature reminds us that relationships between women continue to be shaped by issues of class, race and prejudice. This analysis allows us to think about the ways feminist perspectives shape texts across ethnic boundaries, to appropriate and challenge perceived stereotypes. This paper contributes to the conference theme by stressing the ways theories travel across national and ethnic boundaries, a crucial perspective in English studies today.